For Patience, Who Died With Her Lover In the Summer Sun by Greg Rudolph

This natural thing
the rising/falling tidal pull
A friendly gaze made sour by
a year or two away, passing
like a ghost in mid-day through
the halls of mine mother’s old summer home
The air stagnant over its patient oak plateau,
panting but not yet perspiring,
chasing sand through parched desert air like
some operation of misfortune
Could I still smile at the sun on your face?
My solitary grace found in the artifact quality
of the language we speak—
As urgency to pursue or
for freedom to love
is there method to the way
you connect, you choose, you seperate;
This horror is a window on a spring house and
I am a locust with no wings, drawn
hastily on a tea stained page
as if by a child upon their bedroom wall
and it shatters—

little aching bits
tumbling around here and there and
clinking together like champagne
flutes in the sweaty palms of my dinner
guests or like a winter wind chime hung with reverence above
a fetid old oil stain scrubbed inadequately from a concrete
garage floor and a lazy
breeze pulls past singing
the names of twelve street lamps in a row
losing power and falling dark and
it shatters.
it shatters,
all too completely.

 

Greg Rudolph is a poet, essayist, and appreciator of punk music from Des Moines, Iowa. Greg’s published works include his poetry compilation ‘Someone Used to Live Here, Long Ago’.

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